Examples of services provided by a telecommunications network include an intelligent telephone directory, indicating the accessible contacts, an automatic call referral service, an automatic correspondent call-back service, a messaging service, or a special events notification service, such as the publication of specific information on the Internet.
However, users of such services increasingly have a plurality of terminals (stationary personal and office telephone, mobile telephone, computer connected to the Internet, etc.). Therefore, there has appeared the need to make these services, independently of the terminals, available to users, presenting problems of access to the services and coherency when a single user uses different terminals to access a single service, and management of billing and access rights, when the user accesses a service by means of another service or from different terminals.
Patent application FR 2 814 021, filed by the applicant, describes a service coordination server making it possible to coordinate various telecommunications services, which may be provided simultaneously by different operators. This server is designed to receive and process requests transmitted by the services to identify and/or authenticate a user, when the latter accesses the service, to locate a user searched by a service, to obtain personalisation or authorisation information relating to a user, or to assess services billed by time, volume or on a fee-for-service basis.
However, for a user to be able to benefit from such telecommunications services, it is necessary for the user to be accessible by a telecommunications network. However, the service coordination server described in the aforementioned patent application does not have any capability for determining the state of accessibility of the users. In addition, this concept of accessibility must be distinguished from the concept of availability. Indeed, a user can be accessible, i.e. have a terminal that is accessible by a telecommunications network, but not want to be disturbed during a certain period. This service coordination server does not enable the availability of users to be managed either.